It's Mencken, baby! "No one ever went broke from underestimating the intelligence of the great mass of the plain people." Barnum was a piker in comparison.

And, if torture works so great, how come we don't use it for everything? Sure would cut down on those difficult embezzlement and fraud trials. That HealthSouth exec who beat his wrap would have given it all up for a little waterboard action.

Seriously: The victims of Oklahoma City got justice. So did Ted Kazcynski's victims. So did Ted Bundy's and Polly Kaas's. But, the accused got trials. Because, we want questions answered, we want the truth. When an innocent person is convicted, the guilty one goes free. A cyber buddy wrote,

I was suddenly struck dumb with the realization that perhaps the torture laws are not designed to extract truly useful, time-sensitive information that may be correct, but instead are designed to extract truly useless, timeless information that most certainly is not correct (and would never never have been uttered by anyone who was in their right mind during a righteous interrogation).

"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.

"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."